Great travel photographs can take you back to your favourite holiday destinations. And when it comes to capturing the spirit of a place, at Condé Nast Traveller we know better than most that visual storytelling is key. Composition, framing and background all play a part in creating the most memorable shots. And a sure-fire way to truly elevate travel photographs is to invest in top-quality equipment. So we took a journey across Portugal with HONOR to test out the ‘anywhere, anytime’ capabilities of the new 20 series camera phone. It has four new snap-happy functions, including a panorama-friendly macro lens to enable close-up shots; a 117-degree super-wide angle lens (allowing the photographer to fit more into the frame); a depth assist for portraits; and a party-ready super night mode that produces incredibly clear evening shots. We tried all of them to discover some brilliant new photographic features.

The journey began in Lisbon, where we headed up one of the city’s seven famous hills to the Miradouro Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen. A favourite among locals, this terrace was a great spot to test out the HONOR 20’s panorama-friendly function. The views of the rooftops and pink- and ochre-coloured buildings are clearly defined against the mountains beyond. On the way up to the terrace, the night mode helped us to take a clear shot as the sun set, casting a shadow along the narrow, cobbled hillside street, and capture the light glinting over the terracotta-roofed houses below without losing focus.

Sintra, a charming town just 20 miles from Lisbon, was our next stop. In the foothills of the Sintra Mountains, the forested terrain is studded with pastel-coloured villas, palaces and beautiful gardens that look like something out of a fairy tale. This region has been the holiday destination of choice for Portuguese royals for centuries. In the 1800s Ferdinand II built a retreat so whimsical here that it won the town its UNESCO World Heritage Status. The English Romantic poet Lord Byron similarly fell for its allure, calling Sintra ‘a glorious Eden’.

Next stop on the photographic tour of Portugal was the Algarve’s dramatic coastline. In sunny southern Lagos, less than an hour’s drive from Faro, the macro lens came into play. On the quiet beaches outside the seaside town – specifically on the cliffs of Ponta da Piedade – the lens, which was designed for taking photographs as close as four centimetres to the subject, helped capture the details of the native plants and flowers in the foreground, as well as the colour of the sea. The HONOR 20 series’ wide-angle lens – glass-backed, so it has the holographic effect of giving off millions of prisms of light – made lining up these shots remarkably easy too.